Poetry With Music

"Jeff Lilly's poetry dances through music and delivers a lyrical punch that should be heard and acknowledged out there in the world of words and sound."--Neeli Cherkovski, poet and author of Ferlinghetti: A Biography.

Jeffrey Lilly is a San Francisco-based poet who has recorded two poetry with music CDs  The Butterfly Flies," his most recent, and Promised Land Poems. "A number of poems on my recordings," says Lilly, an openly gay man, "are an expression of eros or a defense of eros." Especially same-gender eros, which Lilly celebrates without fear or shame or equivocation and with artistic beauty.

The Butterfly Flies features three New York musicians: Jonathan Comisar (piano), composer of the theatre piece Things As They Are, about the Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange, that was performed at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in the fall of 2010; Mike Cohen (clarinet and flute), who has performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Birdland, and other venues; and Ivan Borenboim (clarinet), an artist-in-residence at Central Synagogue and a performer throughout the United States, Argentina, and Europe. Hans Christian, the German-born composer on Promised Land Poems, is also a record producer and studio engineer.

Over the years, Lilly, a convert to Judaism in 1992, has read his poetry at his GLBT synagogue, Sha'ar Zahav, as well as other venues in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Jewish-themed tracks on Butterfly include "Rabin" and "Sholom Aleichem.")

Lilly believes his "reading style is more like poetic song that is well matched with the music which amplifies my word." He has been "told I have a good performance voice that goes well with music." In addition, he continues, "I have had the good fortune of having very talented composers [like Comisar and Christian] to work with."

Among the writers Lilly has been influenced by are Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg whose pairing of poetry and music was "one essential part of the Beat movement."

A few of the poems on both CDs mix words from different languages. Lilly, who earned a bachelor's degree in political science at Duke University and a master's degree in Russian language and literature and another one in comparative literature at San Francisco State University, sees this as his way of "conveying a musical sound." He "draws on my studies of Russian, French, and Italian, as well as other foreign words I've encountered in the multicultural world of San Francisco."

Lilly is the co-editor of Art Mugs the Reaper, a project he describes as "an artistic quilt." It celebrates the work and lives of gay men who have died of AIDS. He is also at work on an as-yet-unnamed novel about a Russian emigre writer. The book is an outgrowth of his social service work among Russian emigres in San Francisco.

Jeffrey Lilly can be reached at Jeffrey Lilly Presents by sending an e-mail to JL@jeffreylillypresents.com or by regular mail at P.O. Box 31324, San Francisco, CA 94131.